8. Georges Simenon, The Window Over the Way

[There are a lot of spoilers in this review.]

Just when you think that this story cannot get any darker, it surprises you and gets even darker to the point that this Simenon book should be called un roman noirs instead of un roman durs.

The story is set in post-war Batum, a seaside oil town bordering Turkey in what is now Georgia, just as the communists were taking a strangle hold on power. Simenon does a masterful job of describing Batum as a labyrinth of unpaved roads bordered by unwashed and unremarkable houses that are in various states of disrepair. He describes the residents of Batum as the worst kind of informers telling on their friend to the KGB for a meager addition to their rations. Batum, in Simenon's eyes, is the end of the line kind of city where nobody voluntarily goes to live but for people who have no choice. Simenon paints such a dark and depressing picture of the town that it almost comes alive as a character in the book.

The four characters most involved in the story are Adil Bey, the Turkish Consul; John, a reporter for an American newspaper who ultimately arranges for Adil Bey's and Sonia's escape; Nejla, the Persian Consul's mistress, and for a time Adil Bey's lover; and Sonia Kolin, Adil Bey's secretary and lover.

The story begins with a cocktail party at the Italian Consul's home where Adil Bey, the protagonist, is introduced to the four of the five ex-patriots living in Batum: the Italian Consul and his wife and the Persian Consul and his lover. Adil Bey takes offense with some comments made by the Italian Consul and storms out of the party beginning a period of relative isolation from the other ex-pats. He goes back to his consulate which has been stripped of everything by his predecessor's secretary on his departure and functions as Adil Bey's apartment. You imagine him living in a dark and dusty set of rooms, the equivalent of a contemporary crack house.

Adil Bey is a Victorian style gentleman who is completely unfamiliar with washing his own clothes, putting sheets on the bed, fashioning curtains and buying food: the fundamentals of living. So, he begins this slovenly life of sleeping on the mattress, never changing his clothes, eating whatever food - rotten or not - out of cans, and rarely showering. Simenon repeatedly paints Adil Bey as an anachronism: a man with Victorian mores living in the second half of the twentieth century; a man who fought in Galipoli but doesn't seem to know how to cook his own food; or a man who seems so weak and manages to survive in Batum.

Adil Bey also starts becoming sicker and sicker over time. At first the sickness is not more than a minor inconvenience but then it turns into a bad cough, then into heavy sweating, then into insomnia and then into severe weight gain. This transformation layered on top of everything else really turns Adil Bey into a sad and sickly creature.

In the middle of his collapsing health, Adil Bey falls in love with his secretary, Sonia, and starts a cold almost sterile love affair with her. She comes to see him in the evenings when they make love and then she heads home very early in the morning before the city awakes. While this is going on Adil Bey's health continues to deteriorate until he starts showing symptoms of schizophrenia. He starts walking down the street talking to himself, wandering around the town and the port aimlessly and, most importantly, thinking that everyone is out to get him.

It turns out he is not wrong on the last point. During a fight with Sonia he grabs her purse, rummages through it and discovers that she has been slowly poisoning him with arsenic which is why he has been slowly falling apart. Sonia apologizes and concedes that the communist government had pressed her into doing this and that she truly loves him and he reciprocates the emotion. They make plans to leave town and to smuggle Sonia out of the country on a Belgian freighter that is leaving the next night. But the KGB finds out and kills Sonia and leaves Adil Bey to linger in his own personal hell.

7. Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun

This is the second in the Elijah Baley science fiction mystery trilogy. In this book Baley is called on to travel to one of the outermost worlds colonized by humans to solve a series of murders and attempted murders. The story is interesting but not worth any specific commentary in and of itself because the story is rather overwhelmed by Asimov's thinly disguised metaphors which can easily be connected to some of the issues that people faced in mid-twentieth century America.

Asimov weaves two central themes throughout the book: a suspicion of technology and of more planned (less free) societies. Almost every interaction between the characters in the book is like a mini-battle pitting those who are accepting of technology against those who are not; or those who are accepting of a dictatorship against those who are not. Most books include some social commentary or over arching themes that readers need to understand but in this book the themes take a primary role over the story itself.

Asimov is clear that he prefers more freedom and more technology which is not a surprising outcome. But after reading the book I have come away thinking that Asimov is not such a brilliant writer, rather, he is a scientist with a literary bent and a great imagination.

6. Cold Steel by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey

This is the story of one of the nastier hostile take over battles in European corporate history when the Indian ex-pat owned Mittal Steel made a hostile bid for the Luxembourg based Arcelor Steel. The saga began in earnest after Guy Dolle, the President of Arcelor, received the following phone call from Lakshmi Mittal, the CEO of Mittal:

This is Lakshmi Mittal. As a matter of courtesy I am calling to tell you that tomorrow I will mount a public offer to your shareholders to take over your company.

Mittal Steel was established in the late 1970s when Lakshmi Mittal purchased an under appreciated steel mill in Indonesia and set about modernizing the facility and increasing its output. With that business prospering, Mittal assembled the largest steel producer in the world by purchasing steel mills throughout the world. He bought facilities in the US, the Caribbean, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In just over 20 years he became one of the richest men in the world from basically nothing.

Arcelor, in contrast, was a hundred plus year old company which was the product of the merger of the largest French, Spanish and Luxembourg steel producers. It was run like many pseudo state run companies in continental Europe as a partnership between its unions, its management, its shareholders and various governments.

I think what makes this story interesting is the clash of cultures: the brash entrepreneurial culture of the Mittal group versus the staid bureaucratic culture of the Arcelor managers. From the start, the Arcelor managers played this battle incorrectly. In one of their first press conferences, and in one of the most stunning demonstrations of French racism, the head of Arcelor described the Mittal bid as follows:

Mittal's offer consists, if you will excuse the expression, of monkey money.

He then went on to describe how it would be wrong for Arcelor, such an icon of European industry, to be managed by Indians.

Six months later, after having thrown everything including the kitchen sink at Mittal's offer, the Arcelor board of directors relented and allowed the company to be acquired by Mittal Steel. The subsequent years have shown all of Arcelor's and the European's fears to be unfounded. The combined company is known as ArcelorMittal, it is based in Luxembourg and it employs tens of thousands more people in Europe than it did before the take over.

This was a great, fast story.

5. Second Foundation: Galactic Empire by Isaac Asimov*

The Second Foundation is the third novel in Asimov's Foundation Series which I find interesting because the stories are a merger of diplomacy/politics and science fiction. I have not read any of the other Foundation Series novels but picked this one up because it was included in the box of novels that Adam sent me last year.

As you can tell by the title the first Foundation has collapsed and an entity called the Mule has taken over the galactic government. He rules by manipulating people's brains and making them his unquestioning followers so it is by no means a benign leadership. The Mule hears rumors of the existence of a budding Second Foundation which is in the process of accumulating sufficient power to take over the Mule's leadership and sets about to try to find and then to destroy the Second Foundation.

As I write this quick summary I am surprised that I was not more engrossed by this book: it is certainly a cool premise and something that is right up my alley. Nevertheless, I find the story to be somewhat plodding and not as entertaining as I had built it up to be in my mind.

4. Master & Commander by Patrick O'Brian

This was a fantastic adventure story though all of the sailing jargon did get me a little confused and reaching for my dictionary more often than I would have liked. The book is well reviewed by my 50 books colleagues here and here.

3. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon

Finishing this book was a little bitter sweet for me because it means that I only have one more of Simenon's roman durs to read and then I will be done with all of them. They have all been awesome books and this one does not disappoint.

This is a very dark story of a prominent French stage actor whose wife left him for a 21 year old hunk. Finding it unbearable to live in Paris, he decides to move to America. He first tries to look for work in Hollywood but can't find anything at all that would be in keeping with his stature, so he decides to move to New York where he finds himself similarly out of luck. He starts life in New York living the high life but as he runs out of money he ends up in a dingy studio apartment around Washington Square. Slowly the loneliness of his situation starts to fill every crack of his life and he begins to devolve into a more pathetic creature every day. He wakes up in the middle of the night one day and decides to go to the diner for some food. He has reached such a stage where he doesn't even bother to dress, he just throws on a dressing gown and some slippers and walks out the door. At the diner he meets Kay, a thirty something rather unattractive (by his own admission) woman who is equally lonely and at an equally pathetic point in her life.

They begin a fast paced and high strung love affair and within days they are living together, calling his apartment 'our' place and behaving as couples with months or years of history would. Simenon writes from Francois' point of view and does an admirable job describing his desperation, his pathological jealousy and the physical damage that he does to Kay, his subconscious efforts to destroy his relationship and his final coming down to earth.

The story is a fast paced psychological love affair and Simenon writes it brilliantly always conveying the precipitous edge that Francois and Kay are walking as they conduct their relationship. A+.

2. The Chasm by Victor Canning

This book was published in 1947 and was one of Victor Canning's first books. I expected it to be more of a detective story but it turned out that it is more like a traditional piece of dramatic fiction. The book is set in Italy immediately after the end of WWII and is focused around an English soldier living in Italy called Burgess who is having a rough time dealing with the aftermath of the war. During the war he lost his three best friends and his fiance left him and married another man. Both of these events caused him some trauma to the point that he often halucinates and the thinks he hears his friends voices only to turn around and find that it is someone that he doesn't know. Finally his shrink tells him to leave the base in Bologna and go for a holiday in order to cure himself by doing some soul searching and trying to identify what is really bothering him. So, he heads off to Florence where he wanders around the city visiting all the sites that him and his friends had visited and doing all of the things that they had done together. This exercise is doing nothing for him other than exacerbating his condition.

While at a bar he meets up with an army acquaintance called Marsh who advises him to get out into the country and find some place where he can take in the mountain air and go for long walks to clear his head. Burgess listens and heads off into the countryside and stops at a town called Cappo and checks into the local hotel. On one of his walks he spots a young woman and a boy and decides to follow them. He catches up with them and starts talking to them and he is immediately captivated by the young woman's beauty. He goes to their village and being friendly Italians they invite him to stay with them.

While at this village he discovers that the lord of the village is in fact a Nazi soldier who is hiding out from the authorities. At this point the story diverges into three major themes: his love affair with Gemma who is engaged to a hot headed Italian, his attempts to out the Nazi soldier, and his continued efforts to deal with his hallucinations.

This is not as good a book as the other Canning novels that I have read. His writing is far too colorful and melodramatic for my liking and he makes a number of convenient logical leaps that are just not believable. For example, at one point he looks into the eyes of one of the villagers and realizes that the villager is allied with the Nazi soldier. It is an entertaining read but I wouldn't rush to put it on your bookshelves.

As an aside, the back cover says that the book will be one of Columbia Pictures' "biggest British productions." I don't think that it was ever made into a movie though.

1. The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck

I had read this book when I was in college but I decided to pick it up because it explains a lot about today's economic situation. In the 1970s Michael Milken joined a fledgling second tier investment bank called Drexel Burnham where he began as a low level associate but quickly rose through the organization because he was very smart and because he created the concept of the levereged buyout or LBO which brought in a lot fees for the firm. His idea was that you could buy a company by borrowing a lot of money and using that borrowed money plus a little bit of your own cash to do the deal. He would do this by issuing junk bonds which are unrated bonds that carry a very high interest rate to compensate the lenders for the risk they are taking.

He began doing these deals at a modest pace to finance friendly take overs but then he hit on the idea of doing these kinds of bond issuances to finance hostile take overs and that's when his business really started moving. By the early 1980s he ran a huge junk bond business which had catapulted Drexel Burnham from relative obscurity to one of the stars of Wall Street. He had built such a franchise that in most years he did at least 75% of the junk bond issuances that were completed. To a large degree he was responsible for putting buyout funds like KKR, Blackstone and others into business.

The book paints him as an egocentric self dealing control freak. I find it difficult to trust these editorial type books on these kinds of matters but from what I remember I agree that he was at least a control freak. But then his and the Drexel Burnham empire both came crashing down when he was charged with insider trading, found guilty, had to pay a huge fine and go to jail for a few years. The book is a good story about excess financed by too much debt which is analogous to the causes of today's problems.